The card store

The book reader and the video player write their Anki cards into one place, the card store, in the folder youtube/anki/ of your toolbox. It is one collection whatever the card came from: a deck may hold cards made from books and cards made from videos side by side, and each card remembers which it was.

The store is yours, like your books and your videos: it is never part of the repository, and nothing in Parseh moves or renames what is in it behind your back.

1. One card, one file#

A deck is a folder, and each card is one small JSON file in it. That file is the ground truth: the deck package you import into Anki is built from the files, never the other way round.

youtube/anki/  persian/                              a language's folder    persian-market/                     one deck: its slug      deck.json                         its name, its language, its deck id      cards/20260921-142212-63ef.json   one card per file      media/                            the screenshots and recordings its cards show      deleted/                          cards retired because you deleted them in Anki  japanese/    …  notetypes.json                        what your note types look like in Anki  seen.json                             every note Anki has ever shown the store  inbox/                                the .apkg files dropped on the Sync with Anki page  build/                                the packages the build writes

deck.json holds the deck’s name — nested with :: as in Anki (Persian::Market) — its language, and a deck id.

Anki knows a deck by its name. Importing a package files its cards into the deck that has the package’s deck name, made if need be; the id the package carries is not kept, and Anki gives a new deck an id of its own. So what makes a rebuilt package land back in the deck you study, instead of a twin beside it, is that the two still have the same name.

The id is for the sync, which looks for an exported deck by its id first and by its name after that:

• A deck made on the pages gets an id of Parseh’s own making when its first card is saved. Anki never uses it, so the sync always finds such a deck by its name — as long as no other deck in the store, of any language, has that name too (below).
• A deck brought in from an Anki export (Bringing decks in) keeps the id Anki gave it, so the sync still finds it after you rename it inside Anki.

Either way the store keeps the name and the folder the deck was first given, and every package it builds carries that name. So do not rename a deck in Anki alone: see Renaming a deck for what happens, and how to rename one safely.

The four entries directly under anki/ belong to the whole collection, not to a deck, because in Anki they are collection-wide too: a note type is shared by every deck, and a note’s identifier is unique across the collection.

• notetypes.json — the styling and the card templates of your note types, learnt from your Anki exports (Editing inside Anki).
• seen.json — which notes Anki has confirmed it holds. This is how a card you deleted in Anki is told apart from a card Anki has simply not been given yet (The round trip).
• inbox/ — where an export you drop on the Sync with Anki page is saved.
• build/ — where the packages go when a deck is built.

2. A deck belongs to a language#

A deck lives under its language’s folder (persian/, japanese/, hindi/ — the folder names Parseh’s language registry gives), as every kind of content in the toolbox does. The store lets two languages hold a deck of the same name: persian/videos/ and japanese/videos/ are two folders, and their cards never mix here.

In Anki they would. Anki knows a deck by its name, so both packages land in one Anki deck called Videos. The sync then cannot tell which of the two store decks that Anki deck is, and it updates neither: it reports the deck as one the store does not hold. (Do not take the page’s offer to bring it in: that would write a second file for every note.) So give each language’s decks names of their own. Nesting them under the language is the easy way, and the one the card sheet suggests: Persian::Videos and Japanese::Videos.

A card goes to the deck of its own language. The card sheet lists the decks of the book’s or the video’s language first, under that language’s heading, and the decks of the other languages after them, each under its own heading marked (another language), so that an existing deck is never hidden. You may pick one of those — but the card still lands in the deck of its own language that has that name, made if need be, and the sheet says so when the card is saved:

saved ✓ — “Videos” (Japanese) now has 12 cards — filed under Japanese -- a Japanese card goes to the Japanese deck of that name

The card’s language is what picks its note type when the deck is built, so a card in the wrong language’s deck would be built wrong; that is why the store refiles it rather than obey. It is also how two decks of one name come about, which Anki would merge (above): rather than pick another language’s deck, pick or make one of the card’s own language.

A deck lying directly under anki/, the layout from before Parseh had languages, still works everywhere — it is listed, built, synced and filled — and is read as Persian, as everything written before languages were declared is. Nothing moves it: move it yourself when you like.

3. What a card file holds#

You never need to open one, but it helps to know what is there.

A tag with spaces in it is saved with _ in their place (Anki’s tags are separated by spaces), and a card keeps at most sixteen tags.

4. Why a card’s identifier matters#

Every card carries a guid, made once when the card is saved and never made again. Anki matches notes by it when a package is imported: import a rebuilt deck, and Anki updates the notes it already has instead of adding copies — their review history, their due dates and their ease all stay as they were, and only the cards that are new arrive as new.

That is what makes the whole round trip possible, and also what makes it fragile in two ways worth knowing:

5. What the store can refuse#

The card sheet checks a card before it sends it (see Making a card); the store checks it again, and nothing is written when it says no. What you may meet on the sheet: